What better way to spend a sunny warm Sunday than pottering
around a cemetery looking for rellies. Not mine this time. I was doing a bit of
searching for a cousin back home in NZ. No luck unfortunately even though I had
a grave reference number. Many of the old stones have fallen over and were
covered in debris. Some just had a bit of dry grass over them, while others
were partially grown over. There were places where it looked as though there
was a headstone but probing an inch or two below the surface yielded no clunk
of stone so we left those undisturbed. All I could do for my cousin was to take
a picture of that part of the cemetery and also of some of the houses in the
area where the family were living. Unfortunately the address they were living
at in the 1911 census has now been taken over by a primary school. Ah well,
can’t win them all I suppose.
It’s when we walk around streets like the ones between the statin
and the cemetery that I am so thankful that my parents moved to NZ and that we were
brought up there. I can only imagine what my parents must have thought moving from those
crammed in together, doors opening
straight onto the footpath, to a whole standalone house on almost a
quarter of an acre.
Keeping with the family history. A family history society I
belong to has published a letter I sent looking for help with one of my brick
walls. I’ve already had two replies and now need to sit down with pen and paper
and see if the facts I have been sent fit in with my tree.
I also belong to a site that collects pictures of war
graves, and there were quite a lot in this particular cemetery so I spent a
while snapping those. Interestingly one of those I took a picture of noted that
the person was a crew member on the Wahine.
Why so you ask? Well Wahine would have been an NZ ship.
Almost everywhere we go we see people begging in the street,
and today was no different. As we were standing in the station checking to see
which way we would come home a scruffy individual of about 30, approached us
saying he was homeless and hungry and could we spare some money so he could
eat. We never give money to people like that, and our comment to him was if you can afford
to smoke then you can afford to eat, he couldn’t argue with that now could he.
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